Jussie Smollett And The Enticing Lure Of Victimhood

Why one man gambled and lost everything to stay in the public consciousness

The Jussie Smollett story is ripe for someone to take into a writer’s room and turn into a film. It has everything. Part of me hopes someone does and part of me hopes they don’t — because the last thing Jussie Smollett needs is more attention.

The twisting timeline of the Jussie Smollett case has been difficult to keep up with at times.

It seems to have been finally settled this week with a Chicago jury finding Smollett guilty of five charges of disorderly conduct and acquitted on a sixth. He now faces a potential jail term, though given his lack of previous convictions it’s far more likely to be a probationary sentence. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was overturned on appeal.

As a regular watcher of ‘America’ — my favorite reality TV series, nothing surprises me much anymore.

When Jussie first announced he’d been the victim of a violent hate crime, many rushed to support him. When his story fell apart under a little pressure, many rushed to condemn him. He was cleared of all charges. More support. He was re-charged. More condemnation.

The rollercoaster narrative is exhausting, some think there has to be a better way… there is, it’s called ‘waiting’.

The case for compassionate neutrality

An idea has emerged that holding a neutral position is something of an attack on anyone who has declared themselves to be a victim. How can someone listen to this and NOT be affected? That’s the implication. You, unless you don’t immediately jump in as complacent sympathy foghorn, are as guilty as the persecutor.

It’s a compelling argument because it cuts to the base of what we want to believe about ourselves. We are the good person, the defender of victims, a compassionate well-meaning pioneers of justice. We wear our underwear on the outside of our clothes and moonlight as X-men.

But like the X-men, we’re also painfully stupid, unbearably naive, and prone to bias and looking shit in spandex.

I have worked in social care long enough to know about the complexities of people and the unreliable nature of the interpersonal narrative. That’s why I’m a big advocate of compassionate neutrality.

I once watched a young girl insist in her meeting that Michael Jackson was her father. The fact Jackson was dead before she was born was a minor inconvenience to her narrative. The inexperienced worker who pointed this out got attacked for her troubles.

Sometimes things are more complicated on the inside than they are on the outside and sometimes it pays to know this. I maintained compassionate neutrality. I didn’t believe her, but I believed that she believed her — and for children, that’s sometimes more important. We’d wait and see… and guess what, after a therapeutic intervention it turned out Michael Jackson wasn’t her Dad, he was just a deeply embedded coping strategy.

Most stories, if you dig deeper than the average car park puddle, have a lot more depth to them.

Compassionate neutrality means you reserve the right to make further judgments as information comes to light. It prevents you from coming to an erroneous conclusion in the first instance, then discarding further information using your own confirmation bias.

Jussie Smollett, Depp vs Heard, Asia Argento, Kyle Rittenhouse, R vs Evans — these were all cases where maintaining compassionate neutrality would’ve helped you navigate the constantly shifting sands.

Those people who decided Rittenhouse was a murdering white supremacist from the get-go have had real trouble equating his acquittal with the law. They were unable to adapt from their original position because their original position was biased. Those people who’ve concluded Rittenhouse is an angel haven’t really considered the stupidity of arming seventeen-year-olds in the first place.

And so what we end up with is a group of people polarised against each other, treating the facts of the case as moot.

Compassionate neutrality and Jussie Smollett

The Smollett case was really a skirmish in the ideological warfare between two polarised groups. The real issue to discuss here isn’t whether or not Smollett made it up, it’s why Smollett made it up. That’s a more interesting discussion to have — and one that’s infinitely more pertinent to the world we find ourselves in.

I think ‘victim’ is now an achievable and desirable goal for many people.

At some point in the near past, society has monetized or otherwise rewarded being ‘a a survivor’. There is a fascination with those who have emerged through horrific circumstances and come out with their head held high, one which permeates through fictional writing.

We are the leading men, women, and penguins of our own personal narratives — and as society continues to blend objective truth with subjective fiction, we’re going to see a lot more elaborate play-acting around heroism. Smollett was a man ahead of his time, an indicator of what is to come.

‘In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud’ is a line from my favorite poem. It speaks to personal strength under adversity but in Smollett’s case there was no adversity (or not enough) and so he fabricated some.

Society, in an attempt to rebalance itself, has made victimhood the perfect position from which to operate your narrative. It makes any question of integrity and anything other than unmitigated support an act of oppression. Much of the political back-and-forth of recent years can be viewed as a race towards asserting victimhood first.

That’s a dangerous road to travel because almost all of the triumphant authoritarians were able to weave the victim blanket, wrap society up in it and then squeeze until all the bad people fell out. Bad people in this instance being everyone who disagreed with them.

For that reason when presented with a self-announced victim, I tend to maintain my defense of compassionate neutrality.

Why victimhood is so comforting

It’s part political but part psychological too, being a victim is an excellent intrapersonal defense. If you are the ‘victim’ of poor mental health then you are absolved from any responsibility to solve it. If you are the victim of a ‘manipulative relationship’ then you don’t have to look too closely at your own reasons or motivations for getting into it.

Victims are victims, they are absolved from understanding the machinations of co-dependency and working on their own psychology first.

Victimhood is a comforting cloud of a place, where others will do the thinking and fighting for you. Where the love flows freely and support and endorsements of the unrealised self are flush in every interaction. It’s an enchanting place, an enticing place to be if your life isn’t going as well as it could. And whose life is?

See, that’s what makes Smollett so fascinating.

He’s young (ish), black and gay, on a very high wage compared to the rest of the population. He had no real obvious motivation to orchestrate the fabrication he did, other than he wanted to be the victim and bask in the adulation it brought him.

Smollett’s position in society wasn’t under direct threat. He was in no real danger of poverty nor being pilloried for his sexuality or race — not in the circles in which he moved. So what was it? What compelled him to orchestrate this complicated flight-of-fancy?

What was the lure of being a victim?

To my mind at least, it’s the start of a worrying trend. To have a place at the table, to be granted a chance to speak, to be taken seriously, you must present your victim credentials. Privilege, a successful acting career, and being surrounded by supportive liberals indicate to others you are part of a problem that needs solving not part of the solution.

And thus the younger middle classes must cultivate their mental illnesses, collect their diagnoses, assess their traumas in new lights, do a revisionist history on their privilege to demonstrate why they are still relevant and worth.

In a topsy-turvy world, the empowered victim is the new and only narrative that carries weight and gravitas. Always best to stick it on Instagram.

For those of you who love allegorical structure, it’s a voyage and returns structure. Step into the darkness, return to the light. It’s Alice in Wonderland, it’s Dorothy’s yellow brick road, it’s Nelson Mandela in Robben Island, Charles De Gaulle’s triumphant return, it’s Jesus in the desert.

Luckily, if we’re honest, most of us don’t have a dark-Wonderland in which to venture forth and grow our character and self — and so some of us may be tempted to either make one up or expand the scope of our problems to fit our narrative needs. That seems to be what Smollett did, a gamble that didn’t pay off in the slightest for him.

To become the masterful returning heroes society wants, it needs to give some of its most comfortable and under-persecuted people a dark backstory. Skewing the odds against themselves in the first instance simply in order to beat them later. Some may not even be aware they’re doing so and it’s a terrifying thought about where western society may be headed.

It’s a race to the bottom. And I should know better than most because Michael Jackson is my Dad. Fight me.